March 16, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Sarah Larson’s “Talk of the Town” story “Big Time.” It’s a mini-profile of master rigger Joe Vilardi, who installed Michael Heizer’s new exhibition “Negative Sculpture” at a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea. The show, Larson says, “features ‘Convoluted Line A’ and ‘Convoluted Line B’ (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice.” These sculptures weigh more than eighteen tons. That’s nothing for Vilardi. Larson says that he’s worked with “a Who’s Who of colossal sculpture: Heizer and Serra, but also Simone Leigh, Jeff Koons, MOMA. The biggest and heaviest stuff can involve cranes, hydraulic gantries, barges, and police escorts.” 

Vilardi talks about the time he installed a Richard Serra work at Kenyon College:

“The vertical of the sculpture was sixty feet tall—massive. Years of planning, really difficult. A beautiful sculpture. We were all in awe as we were doing it,” Vilardi said. “You’re bringing in steel plates that weighed close to a hundred thousand pounds each, that had to be then stood up and then one leaned against the next. We had five cranes there, balancing these plates, guys up in baskets working the clamps and lining things up and welding. At the end of it, it’s pretty impressive. It’s crazy when you think, Look what we just accomplished. Who are we? We just started out as a bunch of riggers—and riggers are really what we are—and here we are assembling something, a combined weight of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, sixty feet tall, in the middle of a courtyard of a school, that will be there—it could be there forever.”

Larson’s delightful story reminded me of another New Yorker piece on Michael Heizer’s work – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016). Goodyear visits Heizer’s monumental “City,” in Garden Valley, Nevada, and describes it in detail. Here’s a taste:

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

Michael Heizer, City (Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth)